Benjamin Cain
2 min readApr 30, 2024

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Certainly, spiritual or Platonic dualism can become hypocritical if the enlightened person ignores all the ways he or she is embodied. Even the Buddha would had to have breathed, eaten, slept, and so on. A idealistic purist who has nothing but contempt for embodiment would advocate mass suicide--and indeed I have an upcoming article on that kind of pessimistic antinatalism.

But there's a difference between renouncing some material process, and lamenting it. Even if some sages had sex lives without managing to be outright hypocrites or frauds, I think that unless he or she embraces some pro-sex philosophy such as Taoism or Tantric esotericism, the sage would be of two minds. Specifically, the sage would have to view sex and the other aspects of animality with some irony, in honour of the enlightened appreciation of the suffering produced in the material sphere. Perhaps some who are "enlightened" or nearly so weren't always fully aware of that irony, but their unconscious resentment towards naïve lifestyles (in samsara) would nevertheless express itself. You'd have the double truth doctrine, for instance, or some pragmatic allowance for mainstream culture that's still repudiated on elite, esoteric grounds.

Whether anyone has ever been fully enlightened or transhuman is also questionable, in which case even the noblest individuals might have been partly hypocritical, regardless of how their zealous supporters would rationalize their masters' possible imperfections. Indeed, embodiment would entail some such imperfections and absurdities.

Perhaps you'd like to debate/dialogue with me on some of these issues over email, though, so we could post our exchanges on our respective Medium pages. Email me at the address in my Medium profile, if you're interested.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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